Church vs. beer: A map of what we talk about

Here’s a study in regional differences — and a surprising one at that.

The data-crunchers at floatingsheep.com took to Twitter this month to find out what Americans love tweeting about more: church or beer.

The map looks at tweet counts by county, and King County is all about beer. But our neighbors don’t share our affinity for hops.

The site geotagged tweets went within the continental US between June 22 and 28, then extracted tweets containing “church” and “beer.” There were 17,686 church-related tweets and 14,405 beer-related tweets.

From the data analyzers:

Given the cultural content of the “church” tweets, the clustering of relatively more “church” than “beer” content in the southeast relative to the north-east suggests that this could be a good way to identify the contours of regional difference. In order to quantify these splits, we ran a Moran’s I test for spatial auto-correlation which proved to be highly significant as well.Without going into too much detail, this test shows which counties with high numbers of church tweets are surrounded by counties with similar patterns (marked in red) and which counties with many beer tweets are surrounded by like-tweeting counties (marked in blue). Intriguingly there is a clear regional (largely north-south split) in tweeting topics which highlights the enduring nature of local cultural practices even when using the latest technologies for communication.

The city with the most beer tweets? San Francisco. Dallas tweeted the most about church.